Jonathan Brayne, A&O partner and Fuse Chairman, said in a statement: ‘We are incredibly proud that one of our cohort has attracted the attention of Facebook, a company that will no doubt help them reach their full potential. We work very closely with the companies in Fuse, we get to know the people, the business and the ideas and so we feel confident that this is an excellent move for Bloomsbury AI and we wish them all the best.’

‘The seven remaining companies in Fuse continue to challenge, excite and inspire us and so we look forward to what these relationships will bring but we are unlikely to seek to replace Bloomsbury as part of this cohort,’ he added.

So, there you go. Who said that law firm incubators don’t help……

And, if you are wondering what all the fuss is about:

Bloomsbury AI says of its capabilities:

‘Today, much of the world’s knowledge is communicated through natural language, through documents or speech. Natural language is hard for computers to understand, so technology hasn’t so far been able to give immediate and direct access to this knowledge – even with search it can still take too long, or it can be too difficult, to get the answers you need when you need them.

Our mission is to solve this problem – everyone should be able to ask any question and get the answer immediately.

We’ve started off by building an AI that reads text documents and answers questions about their contents (called Cape).You can use Cape on your own documents or website, so that users of your knowledge can get immediate answers to their questions.

We’re going to use what we learn from this version to improve our AI, so that it can answer more questions – even ones that require elements of reasoning and synthesis. Eventually we want to be able to answer any question that requires reading better than a human.’

Despite having joined the Fuse incubator the company is not that well known in legal circles, and now, perhaps its future will take a very new direction inside Facebook.

Although being ‘new’ to the legal world, it is clearly seen as well-developed enough by some and has already been backed by investors such as Seedcamp and IQ Capital.

Meanwhile, the four remaining companies which are part of the second cohort in Fuse are: